CROSS PURPOSES: Divine DominionLuke 4:1-13Text:. .
. One does not live by bread alone.Luke 4:4IntroductionWe have designed a sermon series for the
next five Sundays in Lent, a series titled CROSS
PURPOSES. The double entendre here
is framed on the scriptural evidence that from the very beginning of his
ministry Jesus was at cross purposes with cultural conditions of his day as
well as with religious leaders who oppressed the people with stringent
religious rituals and empty-headed practices.The second understanding of this phrase cross purposes is that by the time we accompany Jesus to Jerusalem
and ultimately behold him throned upon
that awful tree, we perceive that there were specific purposes of his cross
on Golgotha and that his crucifixion fulfilled a divine plan on our
behalf.Today—CROSS PURPOSES: Divine
Dominion.All Hell Breaks LooseAs we make our way into the wilderness
with Jesus, we remember that immediately prior to this he had been baptized by
John the Baptist in the Jordan River.At the time of Jesus’ baptism, the
Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.And a voice came from heaven, “You are my
Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” [i]According to Luke and Matthew, Jesus is
then led by the Spirit in(to) the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. [ii]Mark’s Gospel insists that, after Jesus’ baptism, the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. [iii]Whether led or driven, Jesus’ wilderness
experience is the direct response to the initiative of the Holy Spirit.God is taking him into the wilderness.And that is precisely where—as John Milton
reported in Paradise Lost—all hell broke
loose.For forty days he was tempted
by the devil, tempted by Satan, says
Mark, and he was with the wild beasts. .
. [iv]All the evils and atrocities of Jesus’
day, all the demonic principalities and powers of Jesus’ world, all the ghastly
and ghoulish inequities of Jesus’ society, all the fiendish and macabre abuses
of the Roman occupation conjoinedand
inhabited this one personification: Satan, the Devil, the Tempter. It was as if
Hell is empty, and all the devils are
here [v]
in this one embodiment of collective evil.Persistently for forty days, this satanic manifestation attempts to worm
into Jesus’ mind and sway him from his mission, undermine his
allegiances, prey upon his fears, infuse him with doubt, violate his identity,
abnegate his relation to the Father, and gratify his lust for life:If you are the Son of God,command this stone to become a loaf of
bread.I will give you all the kingdoms
of the world, their glory and power, if you will fall down and worship me.If you are the Son of God, throw yourself
down from this pinnacle.Show us!Show us!Show us you are the
Beloved, God’s Son!Virgil declared that each of us bears his own Hell. [vi]The wilderness must have been Jesus’ own
Hell.In the midst of the worst of it,
could it have occurred to him:Why this is hell, nor am I out of it;Thinkst thou that I who saw the face of God,And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,In being deprived of everlasting bliss?[vii]Oh! that we could get into Jesus’ mind,
there to fully understand his torment—its magnitude and severity, there to
minister to him in his melancholy, there to commiserate with him in his
misery!Me miserable!which way shall I flyInfinite wrath, and infinite despair?Which way to fly is Hell; myself am Hell;And in the lowest depth a lower deepStill threatening to devour me opens wide,To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n. [viii]But at the very nadir of his infinite despair--at the penultimate
bottom of human existence--Jesus
refuses to abort his mandated mission, for which he gave up all of heaven and
the continuous countenance of God to accomplish on earth.Perhaps on the fortieth day, summoning up
his last ounce of strength, Jesus calls upon the Holy Spirit and rises to his
full height, there to resolutely confront that hellish evil that is actively
hostile to God.If you are the Son of God, turn this stone into a loaf of bread.Jesus at Cross PurposesIt
is written, counters Jesus definitively, ‘one does not live by bread alone.’Each
of us bears his/her own Hell. I’ve been in
the wilderness.I suspect you have been
as well.Whether we were led or driven
in the wilderness, or whether we wandered aimlessly into the wilderness, or
whether we had the wilderness thrust upon us, we have struggled in the
wilderness.Anyone born into the human
condition has wrestled—at one time or another, in one circumstance or
another—with the principalities and powers that surround us.Some of us have lost spouses through divorce
or illness and death, and all hell broke loose.Some of us have lost huge assets in our investment
portfolio during the abominable recession, when all hell broke loose.Some of us have dealt with distracting
obsessions in a stressful society, and all hell broke loose.Some of us have enjoyed a long and satisfying
career before the dreaded day of retirement arrived, and then all hell broke
loose.Some of us persistently return
to work where supervisors are non-communicative, abusive, and demeaning, where
all hell breaks loose, where we could say daily, Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.In the wilderness, we are often our own worst enemies by playing into the intentions
of the Tempter.We feed our fears.Deny our abilities.Doubt God’s grace and forgiveness.Undermine our confidence.Suppress
the promptings of the Spirit. [ix]The
intentions of demonic forces compete with God’s will for human life.In
point of fact, our theology teaches us that demonic forces obstruct God and
seek to ruin our lives.We know it to be
true.Fear, anxiety, greed, violence,
disease; mental, emotional, physical abuse; passion for revenge, obsession with
hatred; depression, despair, helplessness, hopelessness....We have seen—and all too often embraced—the
demonic forces that long to destroy us.In
the wilderness the Tempter’s voice is always audible: If you are a favored one of God, a child of God, turn this stone into a
loaf of bread: gratify your wanton wants and insatiable desires; make it easy
on yourself; turn your back on the purposes of God in your life and build your
own sphere of comfort, self-indulgence, and dominance, all the while
disregarding the needs of anyone else; remember, you come first.Turn this stone into a loaf of bread for
yourself.But
if we listen in the wilderness, we can hear the Savior’s voice as well: It is written, ‘one does not live by bread
alone.’Jesus
Christ is at cross purposes with all the demonic forces that would separate us
from the worship of God, from the life of faith and from our true selves.We do not live by bread alone.We live, rather, by the sovereignty of
God.We live within the Divine Dominion.
Purposes of the Jesus’ CrossThe
words of the Psalmist capture a glimpse of this sovereign God within whose
dominion we live and move and have our being:Lord,
thou hast been our dwelling placeAge
after age.Before
the mountains were bornAnd
earth and land labored in pains of birth,From
eternity to eternity thou are God.[x]The
Psalmist glorifies the Divine Eternity as the only Sovereign Being who is
eternal.Before looking downward he looks upward.Before considering human misery in the
wilderness, the Psalmist points to God’s
majesty in the heavens: [xi]O
Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the
earth! . . . When
I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what
are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? [xii]One
of the purposes of the cross is to show us that God, who has come to us in his
Son Jesus Christ, is the God of the Universe, the sovereign God who is in
charge.Whether or not we understand the
way he rules his world, we are encompassed within his Divine Dominion. We live
within this most excellent canopy [xiii]
of space by the sovereignty of God.We
move within this most excellent world of beauty unsurpassed by only the heavens
above us by the sovereignty of God.We
have our being within the embraces of the human family by the sovereignty of
God.God is sovereign; God is in
control; God has dominion over all he has created.Devils shall have no dominion.Demons shall have no dominion.Death
shall have no dominion. [xiv]So, rise to your full height, look courageously into the face of the
Tempter, and let it be known: One does
not live by bread alone but by the sovereignty of God who is in charge.ConclusionSo
let us come resoundingly to this conclusion: Jesus came to destroy evil, to
inaugurate Divine Dominion with the Kingdom of God.In light of this, we can rejoice that: the
Cross is the Sign of the Devil’s defeat, and a continual reminder of Him who
conquered him (the
Tempter); it is also the Sign of Him who “emptied
Himself” of His Divine power, in order to express in His own person the Divine
self-giving to the uttermost.[xv]Whenever
we are bearing our own Hell, and wherever we are wandering aimlessly in our own
wilderness, be well-assured that Jesus was in the wilderness before us and
thereby knows our trials; and he is there with us now, equipping us with the
truth.The most
important truth about the Devil is this: Jesus Christ has conquered him.[xvi]Friends, this is all we need to know
about demons!g g gNotes[i]Luke
3:22[ii]Matthew 4:1; Luke 4:1-2[iii]Mark 1:12[iv]Mark 1:13[v]Shakespeare, The Tempest, I, ii, l. 214[vi]Virgil, Aeneid,
Bk VI, l. 743[vii] Christopher
Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor
Faustus, iii[viii] John Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk Iv, l. 73[ix]Charles Ringma, Seize the Day with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, February 20 entry[x]Psalm
90:1-2[xi]The italicized words in this sentence are from
Paul Tillich’s sermon On the
Transitoriness of Lifefrom his book of
sermons titled The Shaking of the
Foundations, p. 67. [xii]Psalm 8:1, 3-4[xiii] Shakespeare, Hamlet, II, ii, 318[xiv] Title of a poem
by Dylan Thomas[xv]Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, Dogmatics, Vol. II,
p. 145[xvi] Ibid.